8. The Woman Cries Being In Pangs

The woman was pregnant, and therefore, if she lived through the period of her painful gestation, her time would certainly come to bring forth. It is therefore written of her, “she cries being in pangs and strain­ing to bring forth.”

The period during which she was tormented with the pangs of par­turition were the “ten days,” or years, preceding the proclamation and edict of Constantine and Licinius, which were issued, as I have said, A.D. 313. This parturient crisis in the woman’s history is foretold in the letter to the ecclesia at Smyrna in these words — “the Devil shall cast some of you into prison, that ye may be tried; and ye shall have tribula­tion ten days” (Apoc. 2:10). This ten days’ parturient tribulation came upon her with the opening of the fifth seal, A.D. 303. This is known in history as the great Diocletian Persecution, the severest ever inflicted by the great red pagan “Devil and Satan” upon professors of Christianity. In this fifth seal period her “cries” were uttered “with a loud voice, say­ing, Until when, O Despot, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on the dwellers upon the earth?” Her pangs produced these outcries, which need not to be expounded here in detail, seeing that they have been sufficiently treated of in the second volume at p. 264. After the death of the Augustan emperor Galerius, in A.D. 311, her straining efforts began. Her pains now became forcing. She felt that she must die, if she did not give birth to a deliverer. The time of judg­ment and vengeance was to come at the end of “a little while, ” chronon mikron; and of that little while about two years only remained for the manifestation of her son upon the throne of the Roman Orb. The strain­ing efforts of the woman were synchronous with the opening of the sixth seal, by which was initiated that “war in heaven” which resulted in cast­ing the pagan Dragon out, and her own investment with the sun; in allu­sion to which, Eusebius, in his Life of Constantine, says, “In short, as the sun, when he rises upon the earth, liberally imparts his rays of light to all, so did Constantine, proceeding at early dawn from the imperial palace, and rising as it were with the heavenly luminary, impart the rays of his own beneficence to all who approached his person” — lib. 1 ch. 43. The totality upon which these rays of the imperial beneficence fell, was all of the woman’s adherents previously to his drawing the line bet­ween those who recognized his Episcopal Supremacy and those who re­jected it as the usurpation of the Antichrist. After this line was drawn, the rays of his beneficence were reserved exclusively for what he styled “The Holy Catholic Church,” of which he was the acknowledged episcopal head. All others were regarded as perverse and wicked.